“I don’t—” she began, then looked at Graham, who raised his chin up and down almost imperceptibly, and the cashier’s eyes drifted back to Ellie. “Actually, I think I have. Yep.”
Graham beamed at her, just as Ellie gave him a little punch to the ribs. Laughing, he jumped away in surprise.
“Fine,” he said. “You win.”
The woman blinked a few times, and Ellie smiled at her. “Thanks,” she said. “I think we’ll just have some ice cream.”
Afterward, they took their cones outside to one of the picnic tables, where they ate fast, trying to keep them from dripping. They were the only ones out there, alone except for the cars that rushed by, and the occasional seagull.
“This does feel sort of like cheating,” Ellie said, and he looked across at her, his stomach tightening. She’d never mentioned a boyfriend, but then, they’d always avoided anything too specific, and he realized now he’d never even thought to ask. He was still working out how to phrase his question when she held up her ice cream.
“Ah,” he said, realizing what she meant. He felt his shoulders relax. “I’m sure the good folks at Sprinkles will forgive you.”
“Especially since it was in pursuit of a quest.”
“A failed quest,” he pointed out.
“Still.”
“I think you have to be more of a believer for these things to work,” he said, wiping some ice cream from his face. “How are you supposed to find what you’re looking for if you’re not convinced it’s even out there?”
“Yeah, well, if I remember correctly, Ahab caught a few glimpses of Moby-Dick, and Dorothy definitely knew her home was in Kansas,” she said with a grin. “At the moment, the whoopie pie is still nothing but a myth.”
Graham smiled too, and when their eyes met, they remained there like that for several seconds, stuck in an odd kind of staring contest, before Ellie looked away.
“Okay,” she said, tossing the last of her ice-cream cone to the seagulls that were milling about nearby. “Time to pay up.”
She fished a pencil out of her bag, then grabbed a menu from the pile stacked beneath a rock in the middle of the table and flipped it over, sliding it across to Graham. He wiped his hands on his shorts and frowned.
“I never said I was good,” he told her, taking the pen. “Just that I liked doing it.”
“That’s the best kind of good.”
“Any requests?”
“One of your cities,” she said as he bent his head over the paper. He could feel her watching him as he drew, sketching out a series of boxes. He’d been telling the truth; he wasn’t good. It was really more geometry than art, what he did, but he felt himself settling into the motion, the precision of the lines and the sureness of the corners. There was something methodical about it, something cathartic; when he drew, the rest of the world fell away.
He’d filled nearly half the page before she spoke again, and her words startled him enough that his pencil ripped a tiny hole in the paper. He rubbed at it, trying to smooth it out again, then glanced up.
“Sorry,” he said. “What?”
“That woman recognized you.”
He held the pencil very still and felt his muscles go tense. “Yes.”
“That must be…”
He waited for her to say what everyone else always said: That must be cool. Or that must be weird. That must be disconcerting. That must be a dream come true. That must be interesting or awful, crazy or bizarre.
Instead, she shook her head and started again. “That must be hard.”
He raised his eyes, but said nothing.
“It would be for me, anyway. All those people recognizing you. All those cameras. All those eyes.” She lifted her shoulders. “It must be really, really hard.”
“It is,” he said, because it was. Because it was like walking around with your skin turned inside out, tender and pink and shockingly exposed.
But at the moment, the only person looking at him was Ellie, and that was different. He didn’t want to think about all the rest of it.
“You get used to it,” he said, though it wasn’t exactly true. It was just a thing to say when the truth was too hard to explain.
She nodded, and he turned back to his drawing, finishing up the last few buildings, putting in the windows and the doors, tending to the stairs and the sidewalks, adding the occasional flowerpot or fire escape. There was a world to be built right there on the page, and Graham didn’t look up again until he’d finished.
“Ta-da,” he said eventually, sliding it across the rough wood of the picnic table. Ellie propped an elbow on either side of it, and he could see only the top of her red hair as she studied it for what felt like forever.
Finally, she looked up at him. “Seems like a nice place to live.”
“Probably not as nice as Maine.”
“Except they have whoopie pies there,” she said, pointing to a squat building he’d labeled “Whoopie Pie Factory.”
“They have them here too,” he said. “Don’t worry, we’ll find them.”
“Aren’t you gonna sign your work?” she asked, nudging the drawing back over to him, and for a second, he hesitated, all the usual alarm bells going off in his head. But this was different; he knew she wouldn’t sell it online, or let it fall into the hands of bloggers or photographers or journalists, all the many wolves that paced the perimeters of his life. He scrawled his name across the bottom of the page, then started to fold it, matching up the corners, but she reached out and grabbed his hand.
“Don’t,” she said, and he stopped. But even so, she didn’t let go. Her hand felt hot against his, and it sent a jolt straight through him. After a moment, her cheeks flushed pink and she pulled away, turning to take a small book from her bag.
“You can’t fold it,” she said, holding the page between two fingers and slipping it neatly inside the cover of the book. “You’ll ruin it.”
“Doesn’t something have to be valuable first?” he joked. “Before it can be ruined?”
“Anything can be ruined,” she said with a little shrug as she rose to her feet.
Graham stood too, and as he did, the stone heart fell out of his pocket, rolling to a stop on the grass near the foot of the bench. Ellie was already making her way back toward the road, but he paused to pick it up, examining it for a moment before slipping it back into his pocket, where he hoped it would remain safe.